Learning Model: Culture and Climate

Getting Smart Resources

Building An Authentic Learning Culture Starts With Imperfection and Vulnerability

This Getting Smart resource examines how authentic learning cultures are built not through polished systems or top-down mandates, but through leaders and educators willingly modeling imperfection and vulnerability. It offers practical perspective on how school culture shifts when adults demonstrate risk-taking, acknowledge mistakes, and show genuine curiosity alongside students. The resource challenges practitioners and school leaders to examine their own behaviors as the foundation for psychological safety, arguing that culture is shaped more by what leaders *do* than by what they declare. For those pursuing learning innovation, this matters because transformation stalls when fear of failure dominates—authentic cultures are a prerequisite for the kind of creative, student-centered learning environments that innovation demands.

Using Schoolwide Design Sprints to Seed Student-Centered Culture

This Getting Smart resource examines how schools can use design sprint methodology—a structured, time-limited collaborative process—to build and embed student-centered culture across an entire school community. It offers practitioners a practical framework for engaging staff, students, and stakeholders in rapid problem-solving cycles that surface shared values and translate them into concrete classroom and school-wide practices. The resource demonstrates how design sprints move culture change beyond top-down mandates by creating participatory ownership of new norms and expectations. For school leaders pursuing systemic transformation, this approach is significant because it addresses one of the most persistent barriers to innovation: shifting adult mindsets and institutional habits at scale, quickly, and with sustainable buy-in rather than compliance.

How to Co-Create Classroom Culture with Students

How to Co-Create Classroom Culture with Students” from Getting Smart is a practitioner-focused resource that examines how educators can shift from top-down classroom management toward collaborative approaches where students actively shape the norms, values, and environment of their learning spaces. The resource offers concrete strategies for involving students in defining classroom expectations, building shared ownership, and establishing relational trust as a foundation for deeper learning. It addresses how co-creation practices connect to broader school culture by positioning students as agents rather than passive recipients of rules handed down by adults. For school leaders and innovators, this matters because classroom culture is a critical lever for equity and engagement — when students help build the environment, they are more likely to invest in it, making co-creation not just a relationship-building practice but a structural shift in how power and voice operate within schools.

4 Principles for Transforming Education Institutions and Systems From the Inside

This Getting Smart resource examines four foundational principles for driving meaningful transformation within educational institutions and systems, focusing specifically on how culture and climate function as levers for change. Rather than prescribing top-down reform mandates, it offers practitioners and school leaders a framework for initiating and sustaining innovation from within their existing structures and communities. The resource is particularly valuable because it addresses a persistent challenge in education transformation: systemic change that sticks requires shifting the underlying culture, not just adopting new programs or technologies. For leaders navigating institutional inertia or trying to build shared vision among staff, this piece provides actionable thinking grounded in real conditions schools face. It positions culture and climate not as soft background factors but as core strategic priorities that determine whether innovation efforts take root or fade.

Additional Resources

A spotlight on the practices needed for community schools to thrive

Brookings
This Brookings resource examines the specific practices and conditions that enable community schools to succeed as a model for educational transformation. It spotlights the cultural and climate elements that distinguish thriving community schools from those that struggle, offering practitioners and school leaders concrete insight into what effective implementation actually looks like on the ground. The resource is particularly valuable because community schools—which integrate wraparound services, family engagement, and community partnerships—require intentional culture-building that goes beyond structural changes alone. For leaders exploring this model, the resource provides a grounded framework for understanding how school climate functions as both a foundation and a driver of sustainable, whole-child education reform.

Changing School Culture: A Case Study

NASSP
This NASSP case study examines how a school successfully transformed its culture and climate, offering practitioners a concrete, real-world example of what meaningful cultural change looks like in practice. It provides school leaders with an on-the-ground account of the strategies, challenges, and decisions involved in shifting a school’s environment, moving beyond theory to show how change actually unfolds. For educators exploring learning innovation, culture and climate are foundational—without addressing the human and relational conditions of a school, structural or instructional reforms rarely take hold. This resource matters because it gives principals and leadership teams a reference point for benchmarking their own efforts and understanding the levers that drive sustainable transformation. As a case study format, it supports reflective practice and professional dialogue, making it a practical tool for leadership teams working through similar change processes.

Rebuilding School Community and Culture

NASSP
The National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) offers this resource focused on rebuilding school community and culture, addressing the foundational conditions necessary for meaningful learning environments to thrive. It provides school leaders with frameworks, strategies, and practical guidance for diagnosing and strengthening the relational and organizational fabric of their schools, particularly in contexts where community cohesion has been disrupted or weakened. The resource draws on evidence-informed approaches to school climate, helping practitioners move beyond surface-level initiatives toward systemic cultural change that supports both student belonging and staff engagement. For education innovators, this matters because no instructional model or transformative learning design can take root in a school where trust, shared purpose, and positive relationships are absent—making culture and climate work a prerequisite, not an afterthought, to sustainable school improvement.

Caring Communities: Linking School Culture and Student Development

Aspen Institute
Caring Communities: Linking School Culture and Student Development is a resource from the Aspen Institute that examines the relationship between school culture and climate and the holistic development of students. It presents a model for understanding how intentional community-building within schools—characterized by belonging, trust, and shared values—directly supports academic, social, and emotional outcomes for young people. The resource offers practitioners and school leaders frameworks and evidence-based insights for designing school environments where students feel genuinely known and supported, rather than simply managed or instructed. For educators driving transformation, this matters because culture is often the invisible architecture that determines whether instructional and programmatic innovations actually take root or fail—making it essential to treat climate-building as a core strategic priority rather than a soft add-on.